on quitting Instagram
Or: why do I want so much
Happy Sunday! Today’s essay is a (Paul Hollywood voice) underbaked, over-proved exploration of my relationship with desire, tradeoffs, and Instagram’s role in it all. I hope your thoughts are perfectly baked and sufficiently proved, but whatever state they’re in, I’d love to hear them.
Last year, Mike and I went to Argentina to celebrate the wedding of one of my oldest friends. Pregnant, I treated the trip like it might be my last for a while: we stood in line at a famous parilla where they serve you wine on the sidewalk; we ate anchovies and shrimps for lunch; we stayed late at bars discussing which patrons we thought were the hottest. But the best thing we did was tour the city’s world-renowned opera house, el Teatro Colón. As we circled the theater’s ornate atrium, our guide explained that at the height of culture, this atrium was the place to see and be seen. The architecture, she told us, was designed to maximize how many people you could see from any given spot: the central staircase flanked by wide spaces for mingling, encircled by a broad second-level balcony. True of many grand opera house architectural structures, I imagine.
She went on to say that this design led to a noteworthy but not entirely unintended effect: when you bought a dope new gown or inherited an elaborate satin cloak, you’d wear it here to make everyone else in high society jealous. When you got engaged, you’d make sure to waltz through the atrium with your man on your arm so that everyone would know, you know, what was up. In other words, she said, “this atrium was the Instagram of the early 1900s—it was how you showed off how much you were killing it to the rest of society.”
This idea stuck with me, because (fast-forward back to the present day) I no longer go to the atrium. That is, I’ve stopped looking at Instagram. Why? Because I already want so much—and the atrium only makes me want more.
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I’ve spent the last handful of years blaming how much I want on “capitalism” and understanding my rejection of Instagram as a reaction to a general failure to cope under it, believing the whole thing to be a relatively recent phenomenon. But our guide’s description of Teatro Colón’s atrium made it clear: there’s nothing recent about cultural infrastructure designed to exploit and enlarge our want. It’s just the mediums that have changed.
I was reminded of this a few weeks ago, when Mike and I sat down to knock out some travel logistics for some upcoming trips he had to New York. I’d been dreading this task, and when I sat down to do it, it suddenly became obvious why: I wanted badly to go to New York with him—but going really wasn’t practical. In the years before Nova and after COVID, Mike and I adopted a routine of traveling together for work. Since we both work remotely and have a Southwest companion pass (Southwest4life), it meant that when one of us was summoned to New York or LA or San Francisco for work, the other could come along at no extra cost. It was the best.
Naively, I imagined this arrangement continuing with Nova; we’d just bring her, too! Babies are small. But this was before Mike and I had both returned to work, and so the reality that just because we both had offices in New York didn’t mean Nova did hadn’t, um, occurred to me yet. In other words, Nova would need reliable care while we worked—and that shit would be either expensive or hard to come by. Plus, we couldn’t grab a late dinner at Cafe Mogador and stay out drinking cocktails at Shoolbred’s, pretending we had our old life in the East Village back, anyway—homegirl goes to sleep at 7p. Are restaurants in New York even open yet at 7p?!
Going to New York with Mike felt simultaneously impossible to go and impossible not to. I was crushed. And it wasn’t just the fact that I wouldn’t get to go that felt bad; it wasn’t really about this particular trip. I felt stupid—stupid for believing I could just have something that I wanted without incurring the tradeoffs introduced by the fact that my life had, well, changed.
So I couldn’t join Mike in New York. Fine. I let myself cry it out (“feelings just want to be felt” - some Headspace meditation I found while cry-panicking the other day), and then cleansed my sins in the shower the following morning. As I washed off the shame of having a toddler-style meltdown the night before, I reflected on time. Despite the fact my shower now is somehow smaller than any shower I had in New York City and isn’t exactly a ~*spa experience*~, I was relishing the time to myself. Ahhh, time.
The practicalities of Mike’s trip to New York meant that I’d be “on duty” with Nova for three mornings in a row. In a typical week, Mike and I trade off between tackling morning caretaking together vs. splitting it, and I was thinking about how much it helps me to be able to take a morning to myself: on a great day, to exercise, or to write—or even just to shower, to put on clothes. To feel like I took care of myself.
And then, to balance this “selfishness,” a desire to take on the morning with Nova all on my own crops up: to wake up early and make her bottle, to feel like a good partner as I groggily pour distilled water to the fill line. To feel like a good mom as I take her on a walk around the lake, and then feed her baked apples and beans on toast for breakfast. There’s something about trying to care for both Nova and for myself in the same morning that just makes me feel like I’m doing a shitty job at both. But the result of the alternative—one morning for me, one morning for Nova—is that I don’t get any mornings with Mike.
Is it so much to ask to want to be a person who does morning pages and puts on different clothes than what they wore yesterday, and who goes running and can feed a baby without getting avocado all over the kitchen, and who duets Empire State of Mind with Mike (he’s Alicia, I’m Jay-Z) for Nova when she wakes up, and flies to New York every once in a while?! I want so much.
The essay I referenced earlier, Failure to Cope “Under Capitalism,” knows how much I want—and it knows that I blame Instagram, among other (interrelated) “societal structures.” In it, the author, Clare Coffey, criticizes the Millennial-y habit of blaming capitalism for our problems. “The inability to cope in one domain or another is part of being human,” she says, and goes on to explain that the discourse around this inability to cope suggests that it’s not a personal problem, but a political one.
The essay got me thinking about my decision to “quit” Instagram—it’s a classic example of the behavior Coffey criticizes. Rather than just admit that I can’t have everything I want, I (step 1) blame Instagram for serving me ads that make me want, alongside everything else, candles that look like this, (step 2) get mad at corporations that exploit my desire to see pictures of my friends’ babies so they can make money by serving me candle ads, and then (step 3) quit the whole gd thing and feel morally superior for sticking it to “the man.”
But despite my attempts to classify my personal want as a social problem, what’s really going on here is that the moment I’m confronted with any structure that exploits this want, I can’t deal with how bottomless—and, of course, how personal—my want seems.
The idea I read underneath Coffey’s argument is that when we blame capitalism for our “persistent low-grade dysfunction,” what we’re really saying is that we’re unwilling to acknowledge that life requires choices. We’re unwilling not to “have it all,” and while Instagram undoubtedly makes this worse, it’s not entirely to blame. Wanting is just in our nature.
But what is perhaps more insidious about the way these mediums are trending is the fact that we’re also unwilling to not show off the fact that we have it all—or risk, as Coffey puts it, “looking like a loser in the meritocratic game.” To put a finer point on it, she says: “I think it’s possible that for many, considering the shape of your life and then living it with vigor is so difficult because it cannot be externally validated.”
Taking time to “PR” our lives on Instagram, or as the hot Argentines did in Teatro Colón, is one of the most common ways we seek external validation, and is perhaps the deeper reason I felt like I had to “quit.” Choosing to spend time curating feels like just another tradeoff—something we have to give up time doing something else, like cooking, chatting with a neighbor, or corresponding with a friend, in order to do. The type of activities, Coffey points out, that “cannot be tallied up and out on a resume.”
I’m not saying this tradeoff is inherently a bad one to make, but it is a tradeoff. And it makes me wonder: does PR-ing our lives on social media erode the very story we’re trying to tell, the story that our lives are so frictionless, so happy, even so “real” that we have extra time to broadcast them?
Admittedly, I use this newsletter in a similar way: to document my existence amidst the struggle; to prove that I’m still here; and yes, to show off the fact that somewhere in the surviving, I have moments of thriving, too. Like, when I finally inherit my badass satin opera cloak, you better belieeeeve I will be including pix in this newsletter. I am not immune. But I’m also asking how I can start to give myself credit for the tradeoffs I make to have the life I’ve chosen, and not wait for someone else to praise my decisions in order to feel ok.
Letting Mike go to New York without me was painful because I wanted the credit! I wanted to be seen in the atrium, heroic mom of nine-month-old travelin’ like she used to! But I’m trying to let go, to muscle my way through (fine, cry my way through) the unglamorous tradeoffs and give myself credit for picking the thing that feels right to me.
I popped on to Instagram for a quick scroll last weekend for the first time since December. I wanted to tune into the conversation around Mother’s Day, and man was it a pleasure. I miss that quick hit of dopamine that comes from seeing an adorable picture of your college-best-friend’s-best-friend-from-home with their baby!!! But it felt clear to me that what I was experiencing was really just a suggestion of connection, and that if I wanted the real thing, I’d have to go beyond IG, beyond the atrium. To leave the opulent lands of external validation, to forgo the mirage. To search for the real connection, even if there’s no credit to speak of.
Thanks for reading! Obviously, I’m curious what you’re wanting this Sunday, this week, this month … and whether it feels like too much. Even if it doesn’t, I know you’re making tradeoffs and I’m here to give you credit! Wait, no, we’re working on not wanting credit …
Next time I’ll be back with provisions, including a perfect poem.
Love,
Becca
The question I have is whether Mike is going to slam cocktails at Shoolbred’s.
Beautiful post Becca. I've also found it tough to fully accept the many sacrifices that parenthood requires.